The Productivity Puzzle

Integrated resource management program helps ranchers piece together strategies
that work

If you examine one piece of a 3,000- piece picture puzzle  or even three
or four  it's nearly impossible to see what the entire puzzle means. Running
a business is often like trying to put a puzzle together. You have to understand
how all the pieces fit together before you can see the big picture.

For a cattle rancher, the puzzle pieces include cows and bulls, pasture and
water, finance and markets. They can be combined in many ways  some profitable,
some not. Researchers at the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station are helping
ranchers fit those pieces together for optimum profit and production.

In 1981, Colorado State agricultural scientists started working with individual
producers to identify successful management practices  and unsuccessful
ones. Then, in 1983, a national initiative called Integrated Reproduction Management
was established to help deal with a growing nationwide trend: cattle ranchers
who were in financial trouble.

Gordon Niswender, an animal reproduction and biotechnology researcher at Colorado
State University, has been involved from the beginning. He remembers a common
pattern in the puzzle. For many ranchers, things seemed to get out of hand just
as they tried to get ahead. To make more money, they maximized their operations
to deliver more beef to the marketplace. But even as they began producing more,
they had to spend more and more money on cattle, grain, and other inputs. Debts
grew and the entire operation was threatened.

Niswender and others began by looking for common denominators, some magic piece
of the puzzle that would show up at the ranches that were having trouble. They
soon found, however, that this approach was too simplistic.

"Every ranch has unique problems," says Niswender. "After working
with producers of all sizes from every part of the state, we didn't find many
common specific problems." But, he goes on to say, "We did discover
that some producers may not notice how one decision affected their entire operation
 usually because they're just too close to it."

Suddenly, a new picture began to take shape. Niswender and the others realized
building a successful cattle operation took more than just finding the right
pieces  it takes someone with the skill and knowledge to put them together.

"Integration is the key to success in agriculture," he says. "It's
not just how the cows are fed, when the calves are weaned, or which bulls are
used. It's how all of those factors interact in a profitable big picture."

Armed with that insight, Niswender and the others went on to create Integrated
Resource Management (IRM), statewide program that helps individual ranchers,
communities, students, and researchers better understand the puzzle that is
agricultural management.

Often, when the team sat down to look at a ranch's financial and production
records, it also was the first time the costs and profits of each piece of the
operation had been broken down in detail. "You can't walk onto a place
and predict the problem just by looking around," Niswender warns. "You
have to break it down and look at it piece by piece."

Since 1983, IRM has developed programs and specific methods for building a
successful big picture that are passed on through community workshops and field
days. IRM has even changed the way agricultural management is taught in the
classroom at Colorado State University.

"We now teach students to look at each scenario and see how it works within
the operation, before adopting a new practice," Niswender says. "In
modern agriculture, you may have more possibilities and outcomes, but you also
have more opportunities to mess things up. And you can't just understand cattle
nutrition and reproduction; you have to understand how those things interact
with everything else and all of the potential outcomes."